Around the time Paris Hilton made accessorizing with a Chihuahua “hot,” Angelina Jolie made it hip to wear an exotic, adopted, ankle biter on her scrawny hip. Jolie’s couture kids are fully color-coordinated. The actress “has six children, three of whom were from international adoptions.”

But there’s one thing the spoilt-rotten Brangelina bunch can’t have. Pop Eater tells us that the ill-bred brood will be brooding on Thanksgiving, because mommy dearest is against the feast.

“Angelina Jolie hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans,” a friend of the actress tells me. “To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style. She definitely doesn’t want to teach her multi-cultural family how to celebrate a story of murder.” … “Angelina gets so grossed out by Thanksgiving that she has made sure her family will not be in America this year on Thursday,” an insider tells me.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.
That’s why they nearly all starved.
When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.
This entertaining and historical story shows that the actual hero of the Thanksgiving was neither white nor Indian: “Squint and the Miracle of Thanksgiving”
“So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented,” wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land.”
In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.
“This had very good success,” Bradford wrote, “for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many.”
Because of the change, the first Thanksgiving could be held in November 1623. …

UPDATE I (Nov. 25): A joyous Thanksgiving to all (besides the enemies of liberty who are everywhere around us).

UPDATE II: “BAD EAGLE HAS SPOKEN.” Somehow I doubt that joyless Jolie, of the giant wagging finger, would appreciate the words of Bad Eagleon this Thanksgiving day:

“… BadEagle.com thanks all American Indians for their faithfulness, for their strength, and for their patriotism. We are exceedingly proud of the fact that Indians are exemplary in America, and humbly happy that American Indians set this example before the greatest nation on earth. We are still here. Our presence reminds America of what it means to be a nation, to love a nation, and to preserve a nation–precisely what America needs to know now. America’s Stygian state, its mindless drift on the river of Lethe, and its apparent fascination with deception and corruption, all spell disaster soon-coming. BadEagle.com is profoundly thankful to American Indians for providing a ready lesson in the costs of nationhood.”

In my yet-to-be published book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, I draw similar distinctions to David’s (hereunder in the Comments Section) with respect to the willful destruction by the British of the Zulu nation. Nothing the much-maligned Boers have ever done remotely resembles the massacres and mass murders committed by the “Anglo-American axis of Evil,” a chapter so titled in Into the Cannibal’s Pot. Ditto the Indians. Nothing the Amerindians have ever done within their self-governing territories—including to wage merciless and murderous internecine warfare on neighboring tribes—has come close to the ethnic annihilation visited upon them by the American, and other colonial, states.

American settlers defended themselves against hostile Indians as was their right (the parallels to the Boers at the Battle of Blood River are obvious). What successive American governments and military did to the Indians—these are crimes against humanity as only the state could commit.

These are the facts, nothing more.

While David is drawing distinctions between myself (a classical liberal) and other conservatives, here’s another shocker. I made friends with two exceptional men at WND’s annual conference: Albert Thompson and Erik Rush. Both were taken aback when I expressed this view on reparations: Where title to land stolen during the era of slavery can be traced, I would support reparations. The logistics, naturally, are difficult. But the principle is not. What was stolen, must be returned. Of course, the nation’s race hucksters have turned a debate about individual property rights into one sanctioning collective guilt and state-directed shakedowns.

UPDATE IV: We discussed the crimes against Japanese civilians on the Barely A Blog post titled “White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki.” Unfortunately, the comments were lost, but my replies to them in the form of updates remain, as do the hyperlinks. Forgive me for not reposting the same comments in favor of the mass murder of innocents. However disdainful, on the anniversary of that crime, I may open up this forum so as to relitigate these crimes.

“Robert Hughes writes: ‘Historical evidence shows that the people of the Americas had been doing very nicely for centuries and probably millennia when it came to murder, torture, materialism, genocide, enslavement and sexist hegemony.’ In our silly view of native Americans we have, says Hughes, perpetrated a stereotype in which European man has become the demon, and the native has been canonized.”

In light of archeological findings, the myth of the purity of primitive life juxtaposed to the savagery of Western Culture is even less justified. The Americas are scattered with archeological evidence of routine massacres, cannibalism, dismemberment, slavery, abuse of women and human sacrifice among native tribes. Why, the Northwest Territories Yellowknife tribe eventually disappeared as a direct result of a massacre carried out as late as 1823. By the same shift of logic, should remaining native “nations” perhaps not be made to pay reparations among themselves?

BUT the same essay ends thus:

“In no way do these facts mitigate or excuse the cruel treatment natives have endured. All they do is cut through the ‘rhetoric of moral superiority’ and challenge the cultural script.”

Post navigation

12 thoughts on “UPDATE V: Killjoy Jolie (Ignoble Savage)”

So maybe Angelina should stipulate that only Indians can go see her movies!

While there was some hideous treatment of the natives by many white people, I do not know why all the guilt over an advanced civilization cultivating an almost empty, unused continent which was sparsely inhabited by primitive cultures. Do these “sensitive” people think we should all go back to being hunter-gatherers or cave dwellers??

Myron, part of the point I think is that we should not _all_ go back to being hunter-gatherers, but you should and I should, while Angelina will not give up either her private plane or her Beverly Hills mansion. (And if she doesn’t own a plane, then surely she will be waved through the lines by TSA, while the rest of us will not.)

I would love to see privileged leftists like Angelina live in accord with their believes; it doesn’t happen.

And on the economic lesson presented by Stossel: it’s interesting how both failure and success accrued to the same population, based entirely on their choices of what to do with available resources, both natural and human.

Ah yes, those peaceful, noble Indians, living in the Garden of Eden before those diseased and evil whites came along. I’m sure Jolie thinks that we should continue to feel guilty for slavery, even as whites are being actively culled in our cities. Heads the Other wins, tails you lose, forever.

The word “native” is used by liberals in order to delegitimize the actions of Europeans (“They were here first”), but liberals always attempt to arrest that train of thought before it can arrive at its logical conclusion. Once the “native” argument is begun, it never stops. The land that the natives occupied when Europeans arrived was owned by other “natives” at one point, before these were displaced or massacred by the “natives” that came after. All nations are created from conquest, including those of the “natives.”

If you make a treaty, you should keep it, but the Indians were not civilized people. The depredations common to virtually all the tribes, including the murder and scalping of women and children, could never be forgiven or forgotten. When one looks at the vast sweep of military history, it quickly becomes apparent that warfare is common to all mankind, and the primary sin of the Europeans is that they were simply better conquerors than the “natives.”

[What was done to the Indians, on the other hand, was not very civilized either.]

Conquest is never very civilized. I’m sure the Goths mistreated the Visigoths, the Romans mistreated the Gauls, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Frankly the Indians had to be neutralized and the Buffalo had to be killed off or we could never have had a country. I wonder how much corn would be grown in Iowa or wheat in Nebraska if 50,000,000 buffalo migrated through those areas 2 or 3 times a year. Not to mention having to fight Comanches on a regular basis. This is a harsh way to look at it but this is the way life is. Harsh.

“Civilization” is not synonymous with morality or integrity, obviously. White is not right by virtue of “civilization.” Right is right. Sometimes right means “civilization,” sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t think dialogue about social justice should be based on “civilization” v. “tribalism.” This is a false dichotomy. The point now is this: what positive role can Indians play in modern America? I have tried for ten years to make Indians part of the conservative dialogue. I find no professional conservative talkers (in media) able to talk about Indians, except in a derisive, negative, disdainful way. They have not understood their “guilt” properly at all, because they don’t understand American Indian history (which IS American history) properly. Ilana is one of the few exceptions, along with Michael Barone, Ann Coulter, (and believe it or not, Debbie Schlussel). Limbaugh, Ingraham, Hannity, Levine, etc., have no talking points at all about Indians–except stereotypical disdain. Pity.

Second, in regard to Van Wijk’s comment:
It seems to me that he was repudiating the “Nobel Savage” myth that is common among leftists in regards to the Native Americans. While the Europeans certainly weren’t saints, neither were the Native tribes. Many of the tribes were fierce warriors, not meek little innocents. The colonists nearly lost the fight against the Native American tribes.

That was exactly my point. The Indians were killing each other for centuries before the first Europeans showed up, and they were certainly as aggressive as the whites (both sides who fought the French and Indian War employed enthusiastic Indian allies).

James Huggins makes a very valid point in that if the Indians had not been conquered, the United States would not exist in its present form. I would add that there is a dilemma that comes from wholesale condemnation of the treatment of the Indians, since every American reading this has profited directly from the conquest of Indian land. If what was stolen must be returned, are we not morally obligated to hand over most of the country? Should the colonists have been happy with the just the eastern seaboard?

So long as tribalism does not interfere with or replace moral and ethical concerns, a certain amount of tribalism is vital to a people’s survival. Naturally, it is only white people who have had the tribalism beaten out of them over the past several decades. Slowly but surely, it is returning. All other things being equal, the interests of my people trump yours. My people, right or wrong.

In the interests of transparency, I will also state that this woman was my blood. She was abducted with several other women and children by the Comanche, raped, impregnated, beaten, and brainwashed. Her grandfather John Parker had his genitals cut off before being scalped. Those who want to chide me into feeling guilty about what happened to the Indians will be waiting a long while.